June through January in Exile
(healing the magick)
Dear Kris,
I suppose I never told you that when I came back that I could only stay for a very short time. It has to do with all sorts of slippery things having to do with the physics of time travel, I guess. It was explained to me by someone who I thought spoke my language but ended up speaking in numbers. I apologize for my short stay and sudden disappearance, but enlightenment is like that sometimes.
So I send this to you from a long way away, hoping it will get there eventually, or perhaps sooner than eventually.
June fourteenth
After traveling, a long drink of cold water.
Trancelike, I enter exile.
July
There were memories of a note sung
by someone who only in that moment was a monk
calling me out. Remembering a minute of sainthood
followed by the laurel and linden.
August
The heat today
makes all manner of air melt
forgivingly in my mouth.
No wind for the voices to carry on, no water for the birds
to fly in.
I am sitting, suffocating on freedom.
September
Fall again, and the time here
turns painfully. I am one long,
exposed, aching nerve, and my bed
is shattered glass. The remnants of hope
mangled by exposure to something real.
October
In the place of a soul I have a blade
cut from a mountain. "Pain drips."
November
I am learning the language of incantations.
The words are small serpents, temptations.
I decline and master them.
I am learning at last where my power begins.
December
I have asked questions of things I believe to be divine.
The silence is full of reluctance.
January
Today I found a compass rose in the garden. I picked it
and it showed me which way hope was.
Oblique to truth.
Love,Ariane
1994